Can How-to-Write Books Teach You How to Write Books?

[Note: This essay replaces my earlier essay “How to Write”, which I accidentally published when it was still a draft.]

I used to write software manuals for a living. After spending many years in that line of work, I concluded that it is not possible to write well about software. It is not possible to write well about murk — that is, to write about it with pleasing clarity.

Now that I am retired, I am trying to learn how to write about subjects that are less murky than software. The possibility of success — at least my subject matter doesn’t preclude it any more — has stimulated my interest in writing to a degree that I have started to buy how-to-write books. The shelf above the desk where I do most of my writing holds several of them. Their presence admonishes me to do my best as I add word to word to make sentences, and sentence to sentence to make paragraphs, and so on. Do I read these books? Not very often.

I write the way I do, no better or worse, because of all that I have read. I believe that I am typical in this. When people write they draw on the words, phrases, and rhythms that they have stored in their minds as they were reading. All this borrowing and using goes on half consciously, of course. Conscious and deliberate plagiarism is another matter. Here nothing is recast in the writer’s mind to make it his or her own. It is this recasting that redeems a writer from being a thief.

Anyway, I can mention three books about writing that have in fact helped me write better. All are in print and available online. The three are:

The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White, is probably familiar to everyone reading this. Its great popularity is owing to two of its qualities, charm and brevity.

The charm is the impress of the personalities of both its authors: Will Strunk, the ardent and humorous English professor who wrote the book for his English classes at Cornell University, and his student, E.B. White, who revised the book for publication many years later. White had become a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and the author of Charlotte’s Web and other classic children’s books.

When White revised The Elements of Style, he was careful not to add much to its length. Strunk had had no objection to using however many words are needed to say what needs to be said. Still, the more words a writer uses, the greater the risk the writer runs of failing to heed Strunk’s command, “Omit needless words!”. White summarized the contents of the book: “Seven rules of usage, eleven principles of composition, a few matters of form, and a list of words and expressions commonly misused — that was the sum and substance of Professor Strunk’s work.”

And the brevity of The Elements of Style is what prevents it from being truly helpful, at least for me. Because it is so brief, it has nothing to say about many of the problems that a writer faces in the work-a-day world, where regulations are to be explained, warnings are to be given, and rapture must be embodied in plain English.

“Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time,” wrote Roger Angell in a preface to the most recent edition of The Elements. “Less frequent practitioners — the job applicant; the business executive with an annual report to get out; the high school senior with a Faulkner assignment; the graduate-school student with her thesis proposal; the writer of a letter of condolence — often get stuck in an awkward passage or find a muddle on their screens, and then blame themselves. What should be easy and flowing looks tangled or feeble or overblown — not what was meant at all. What’s wrong with me, each one thinks. Why can’t I get this right?”

The Elements of Style assures me, however, that I can get it right. Professor Strunk speaks to us in our despair:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.*

This noble paragraph points the way out of confusion.

The Economist Style Guide: the Essentials of Elegant Writing is more helpful than Strunk and White because it is more detailed, as you would expect of the guide that is in daily use by the staff of that much admired publication, The Economist. The guide is divided, like Caesar’s Gaul, into three parts: a style sheet used by the people who edit the magazine; a guide to the differences between British and American spelling and usage; and a reference section that lists standard abbreviations, terms of address, and so on.

The Style Guide aims to redeem daily English usage from the usages of Twitter and the Internet, with all their resulting loss of clarity and euphony. It also calls attention to misuse of common phrases, such as:

“To beg the question  is to adopt an argument whose conclusion depends upon assuming the truth of the very conclusion the argument is designed to produce. All governments should promote free trade because otherwise protectionism will increase. “

I wish that the Guide had also explained what is wrong with the phrase “Please RSVP”.

The Guide encourages its readers to develop “ a genuine, familiar or truly English style”, which is “to write as anyone would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command or choice of words or who could discourse with ease, force and perspicuity setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.”

And by “English style”, they do not mean “British style”, for they quote with approval the words of the most American of writers:

“Mark Twain described how a good writer treats sentences:  ‘At times he may indulge himself with a long one, but he will make sure there are no folds in it, no vaguenesses, no parenthetical interruptions of its view as a whole; when he has done with it, it won’t be a sea-serpent with half of its arches under the water; it will be a torchlight procession.’”

Let our sentences be torchlight processions!

The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose, by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge

Graves and Hodge began to write The Reader Over Your Shoulder in 1940, just after the fall of France and the evacuation of British forces from Dunkirk, and they regarded their book as a contribution to the war effort. They deplored the way that their countrymen, even the best educated, had taken to expressing themselves in prose that was “loose, confused and ungraceful.” Poor communication could lead to wasted effort or even fatal mistakes. “We regard the present crisis as acute enough to excuse this book,” they wrote in its introduction.

Their book, they wrote, is “concerned partly with the secure conveyance of information and partly with its decent, or graceful, conveyance, and have been suggested by our recent examination of a great mass of miscellaneous writing.”

This great mass of miscellaneous writing consisted of magazine articles, official memos, letters to the editor, and books on current topics. The authors of the great mass included members of England’s literary and intellectual elite, such as T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, John Maynard Keynes, Cecil Day-Lewis, Ezra Pound, Stephen Spender, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.

The faults that they found in this great mass suggested to them twenty-five principles of clear expression and sixteen of graceful expression. They annotated selections from the great mass to point out violations of these principles. And then they rewrote each selection to illustrate how it should have been written, according to their principles.

Yep, they corrected and rewrote stuff by John Maynard Keynes and George Bernard Shaw.

Evelyn Waugh, in his review of The Reader Over Your Shoulder, wrote that “as a result of having read [it]…I have taken about three times as long to , write this review as is normal, and still dread committing it to print“.

It is easy to mistake the point that Graves and Hodge were trying to make, however. It is not that to write clear and graceful English, you must possess gifts greater than those possessed by T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and company. If such were the case, there would be no point in writing handbooks for writers of English prose.

Their point, rather, is that if you don’t pay close attention to what you are doing when you write, you will make mistakes that will confuse and frustrate your readers, no matter how gifted or experienced a writer you are.

There is a message of hope here, too. If you do pay attention, you can avoid confusing and frustrating your readers, however modest your gifts.

The Reader Over Your Shoulder is by far the most helpful handbook for writers that I know of. (Hmmm . . . do I want to write “know of” or “know about”? See? I’ve read The Reader Over Your Shoulder.)